The Impact of the Imperial Wars (1898-1907) on the U.S. Army

The Impact of the Imperial Wars (1898-1907) on the U.S. Army

The United States Army
as an institution devotes considerable attention to the study of
history as a guide for current and future policy. Much of the
cur­rent Army transformation program is justified by appeals to
the supposed lessons of the past. Indeed, until recently, it was
almost impossible to attend an Army transformation briefing that
did not contain at least one slide on the Blitzkrieg and the
Maginot Line. Historical vignettes illustrating tactics,
leadership, and Army values fill doctrinal manuals, and
professional journals often publish articles that draw parallels
between the past and present. Military history also plays a
significant role in professional military educa­tion, from ROTC
classes to the Army War College.

The Army also has
institutionalized the study of the past in places such as the
Center of Military History, the Military History Institute, the
Combat Studies Institute, and the Center for Army Lessons Learned.
The Army's published histories on World War II, the Korean War, and
the Vietnam Conflict remain the benchmark for operational history.
Even academic historians, who have a philosophic bias against any
practical applica­tion of their discipline, must acknowledge
the quality of the research, the institutional effort expended on
studying the past, and the sophistication of much of the historical
analysis.

Yet, until
comparatively recently, the Army has largely limited its focus on
historical "lessons learned" to large-scale conventional operations
or the "Big Wars"-particularly the Civil War and World War II and,
to a lesser extent, peacetime periods of transfor­mation such
as the post-1898 "Root Reforms," the 1919-41 Interwar Era, and the
pre-Gulf War peri­od which prepared it to fight such wars.
Institu­tionally, the Army has largely ignored the study of the
irregular conflicts that have been, and continue to be, the
service's more common experience.

Indicative of the
Army's limited focus is that it published an official history of
the Gulf War in 1993, but not until 1998 did the Army historical
program publish the first comprehensive analysis of Army
counterinsurgency and stability operations between the Civil War
and World War II.[1] A projected volume studying post-WWII
operations has been hung up in the publication process for almost
half a decade.

This year, with
American troops engaged in a frus­trating, bloody, and
unpopular stability campaign in Iraq, the core curriculum at the
Army's Command and General Staff College devoted only one lesson to
studying guerrilla war-the same as it devoted to the campaigns of
Frederick the Great and a fraction of what it devoted to World War
II. The terms used for irregular warfare in military
lexicon-"Operations Other than War" or "Stability and Support
Opera­tions"-indicate the professional military's
convic­tion that these are tasks that are subordinate to, and
detract from, their mission of "Warfighting."

Thus, to assess the
impact of the Army's experi­ence in pacification and stability
operations in the Philippines in the early 20th century first
requires some examination of the institutional and cultural factors
that affected, and often inhibited, how this experience was
assimilated.

From its origins in
1784, the United States stand­ing army or "Regular Army" faced
a competitive tra­dition of citizen soldiering that was
believed, at least in many Americans' minds, to have demonstrated
its prowess in unconventional warfare and "Indian fighting."
Although much of its combat experience was in irregular warfare
along the frontier, it was necessary for the Regular Army to
develop a distinct identity. The design and construction of complex
fortifications to protect the Atlantic seaports from foreign attack
provided such an identity.

With the support of its
civilian superiors, the post-War of 1812 Regulars defined
professional expertise as the practice of "scientific warfare" of
the kind practiced by the European Great Powers. The Army's
strategic and intellectual tradition- outlined by Dennis Hart
Mahan, Henry Halleck, and Emory Upton-focused on military
engineer­ing and large-scale conventional warfare. Frontier
fighting, counter-guerrilla operations, and peace­keeping were
dismissed as little more than skir­mishing and police
work.

The Regular Army's
focus on campaigns and bat­tles, and its denigration of
irregular conflict and peacekeeping as a nuisance and distraction,
was reinforced by the Civil War, and particularly by Gen­eral
Orders 100. Issued in 1863, these directives to Union forces
incorporated both a philosophical explanation and practical methods
for occupation and pacification within the larger context of
conven­tional war. In making a clear distinction between
"civilized" (conventional) and "savage" (guerrilla) war, G.O. 100
made popular resistance to military occupation a criminal activity
and legitimized harsh retaliation against insurgents and the
communities that supported them. The Army's success in
sup­pressing guerrilla war in the Confederacy contribut­ed
to the belief that mastering conventional warfare was more
professionally challenging.[2]

Peacekeeping and
pacification also fell outside of what might be termed the "Regular
Army Narra­tive." Most notably outlined by Upton, this cyclical
interpretation of American military history posits that owing to
its flawed military policy, the United States will never be ready
for war.

In the Narrative,
wartime victory-won by the enlightened leadership of Regular Army
generals- is almost inevitably squandered. Politicians and the
public demand immediate demobilization, soon weakening the armed
forces to pathetic levels and denying them the resources needed to
maintain their fighting efficiency. The Army's history in peacetime
is interpreted as a constant battle by responsible and prescient
military officers to avoid the destruction of the nation's security
and to pre­pare for a future war that they alone foresee. Yet
when this war then occurs, it is these same scorned military
officers who step in and guide the Republic to victory.[3] What
Roger Spiller has referred to as the "small change of
soldiering"-peacekeeping, paci­fication, counterinsurgency, and
similar duties- comprises almost no part of this Narrative, except
perhaps to provide stirring tales of valor and to explain away any
sub-par performance by the Reg­ulars in the Big Wars.[4]

Given both its own
institutional priorities and the power of the Regular Army
Narrative, the Army has encountered numerous intellectual barriers
to assimilating the lessons of its constabulary experi­ence. In
many ways, studying the impact of the Philippine conflicts provides
as much insight into the problems inherent in overcoming these
barriers as it does into such practical (and immediate)
sub­jects as tactics and developing native forces.

Experience of
Philippine Stability Operations

The Army's peacekeeping
or stability experience in the Philippines can be divided into
three parts.

The first phase was a
conventional war waged in central Luzon against Emilio Aguinaldo's
nation­alist forces from February to December
1899.

The second phase was a
pacification campaign for control of the archipelago that was
effec­tively over by mid-1901 and officially ended in July
1902. During this phase, Filipino nation­alists and other
insurgents no longer sought victory on the battlefield, but rather
to deny American control in the countryside through ambushes,
harassment, and attacks on Filipi­nos who collaborated. In
turn, the U.S. forces waged a series of regional pacification
cam­paigns that gradually isolated the guerrillas from their
civilian supporters.

The third phase
consisted of limited counterin­surgency campaigns against
recalcitrant rebels, religious sects, brigands, and Muslim
tribes­men, all of which were effectively suppressed by
1913.

In the Philippines, the
Americans soon learned that effective pacification and peacekeeping
was based on the realities of fighting in an archipelago and on
local politics. The rebels lacked weaponry, training, and
centralized leadership, and were too weak militarily to challenge
more than small detachments of troops. Instead of a national war,
resistance consisted of a series of regional conflicts waged by
local political-military jefes. As a result, the nature of
military operations varied greatly from island to island, from
province to province, and even from village to village.

In some areas, such as
Southern Luzon, many of the elite landowners were initially united
in their resistance to the American rule, but they later
sup­ported the government in its campaigns against
low­er-class brigands. In other places, like the Muslim areas
of the Southern Philippines, tribesmen sup­ported the Army
against Catholic Filipino rebels. There, resistance only began
after 1902 and came from some tribal leaders and individual
jihadists; there was no unified religious opposition.

On the Visayan island
of Samar, nationalist guer­rillas united with a popular sect to
wage a bloody guerrilla war from 1900 to 1902. But this alliance
soon fractured, and when the sectarians revolted in 1904, many
former nationalist guerrillas joined the Americans in hunting them
down. On another Visayan island, Negros, the local elite welcomed
the Americans as liberators, and the resistance movement consisted
largely of another sect, the Babylanes, who were hostile to
everyone. Such diverse and fragmented resistance occurred on the
local level as well, so that it was not unusual for the American
garrison in one town to be under con­stant sniping and attacks
while their comrades a dozen miles away might not hear a shot fired
for months.

At its simplest,
American pacification-a term that meant both the restoration of
peace and the imposition of law, order, and social control on the
population-balanced coercion with conciliation. The latter was
addressed by President William McKinley in his December 1898
"benevolent assimilation" instructions to the military
com­manders in the Philippines.

During the conventional
war of 1899, the Army took some tentative but important steps in
devel­oping a plan for local government, incorporating Filipino
troops, and establishing priorities for social reform. In 1900, the
first year of the occupa­tion/guerrilla war, Army headquarters
in Manila emphasized a "hearts-and-minds" approach, seek­ing to
provide honest and efficient administration, education, medicine,
civic projects, and other social reforms. Although criticized by
some officers in the field as out of touch and poorly suited to the
far more important task of suppressing armed resis­tance, it
played a vital role in securing acceptance of American colonial
rule in many locales.

If conciliation was the
official pacification policy, coercion was its less authorized but
widely used counterpart. From the beginning of the fighting,
soldiers destroyed property and otherwise pun­ished those
suspected of aiding the insurgents. In December 1901, following a
resurgence of violence aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential
elections, coercion became official with the issuing of General
Orders 100. In areas that continued to violently oppose occupation,
there was widespread burning of crops and homes, arrests and
deportations, and population resettlement.

A third aspect of
American pacification was the incorporation of large segments of
the Filipino population. This occurred on several levels, from the
appointment of civic officials (mayors and police) to the use of
spies and porters and to the raising of military units. Although
the Army high command was, in retrospect, far too cautious in
authorizing the use of Filipino forces, these proved instrumental
in the last campaigns of the Philip­pine War and the post-1902
counterinsurgency campaigns. The Philippine Scouts and Philippine
Constabulary became the backbone of the colonial peacekeeping
establishment, making the cam­paigns more intra-Filipino
conflicts than Fil-Amer­ican ones.[5]

Impact of the Imperial
Wars on the Army

The occupation and
pacification of the Philip­pines accelerated the Army's
transformation from frontier constabulary to modern industrial-age
mil­itary organization. Indeed, together with the Cuban
campaign of 1898, they effectively destroyed the "Old Army" that
had provided the nation's standing forces since 1784.[6] The
Civil War veterans who had dominated the Army's senior levels since
1865 were forced to retire because of age, physical infir­mity,
or disease. By the official end of the Philippine War in 1902, the
Army was a very different organi­zation: Almost two-thirds of
its nearly 3,000 offic­ers had been commissioned in the last
four years.

The new Army also had a
new mission. Whereas most of the Old Army had been deployed on the
frontier in peacekeeping duties, Secretary of War Elihu Root
(1899-1903) declared the new Army would have one essential purpose
in peacetime-to prepare to wage the nation's wars.

But, as has usually
been the case, the war that the Army chose to prepare for was not
the war that it had recently fought in the Caribbean and
Philip­pines, nor indeed the minor conflicts it was still
fighting in the archipelago. Rather, the Army focused on two future
scenarios, one very old and one new. The old scenario was the
defense of the coastline of the continental United States against
an amphibious raid by a European Great Power. The second extended
the threat of a raid to Pearl and Honolulu harbors in Hawaii and
Manila and Subic bays in the Philippines. To meet both of these,
the Army developed a thoroughly modern coastal defense
system-complete with state-of-the-art weaponry and fortifications,
highly sophisticated range-finding systems, and a cadre of expert
gun­ners, engineers, and technicians. It also sought to create
a "Mobile Army" of divisions and brigades, supplemented by the
newly organized reserves (National Guard) and equipped with the
newest weaponry.

It very quickly emerged
that the commitment to guard the Pacific possessions was
incompatible with creating this new model army. The primary problem
was manpower. Although the Army was authorized at 100,0000 (four
times its strength in 1898), its actual manpower hovered between
63,000 and 81,000 in the first decade of the 20th century.
Eco­nomic prosperity in the civilian sector and bad pay and
dismal living conditions in the service drove out officers and
enlisted personnel. Repeated military commitments to the Caribbean
and the Pacific meant sustained deployments: At times, almost half
the Army was outside the continental United States.[7] A series of
misguided personnel policies exacerbated the situation: Sometimes
an officer would arrive after a three-month trip to Manila and then
be reassigned and have to take the next transport back. Not until
1912 were the most serious problems addressed with the creation of
a distinct overseas military orga­nization, and then only by
largely abandoning the pretense of adequately manning of the
Philippines and Hawaii.

The imperial wars thus
had a substantial effect on the postwar Army's evolution into the
modern force, but that impact was largely negative. With few
exceptions, the defense of the Pacific territories retarded Army
transformation.

Effect of the Imperial
Wars on Military Thought

It would be an
exaggeration to state that the Army learned nothing from the
imperial wars. Allan R. Millett has persuasively argued that they
impressed Regulars with the potential of rapidly raised and trained
citizen-soldiers, particularly the 35,000-man U.S. Volunteer force
that did much of the fighting in the Philippines in 1900-1901. But
too often, the lessons learned were merely the reaf­firmation
of existing prejudices, particularly the Regulars' long-held belief
that pacification opera­tions were "a thankless sort of
service."[8]

The imperial wars also
vindicated the Regular Army Narrative. The nation had been
unprepared and overconfident, and, as one officer concluded, "we
won the war thus mainly because our adver­sary was too weak to
fight."[9] Moreover, the wars revealed much the Army
had no wish to explore about its own often mediocre performance.[10]
Army officers who sought "lessons learned" thus had to reconcile
two somewhat contradictory objectives: first, to extract
information that would increase the efficiency of their service;
second, to protect their service's reputation. Not surprisingly,
writers focused on problems that could be immediately addressed,
particularly tactics.[11]

In fairness to Army
military theorists, the Philip­pines provided a difficult
problem of interpreta­tion. Once the conventional war ended in
late 1899, American pacification was based as much on individual
officers' adjustment to local conditions as it was on policy from
Army headquarters in Manila. Efforts to establish a coherent
operational narrative floundered amidst the diversity of
experi­ences. There was no centralized resistance, either
political or ideological. Rather, soldiers faced a frag­mented
array of brigands, clans, sects, local para­militaries, and so
on. Troops spent the vast majority of their time on guard duty and
patrolling the countryside; in building barracks, roads, and
bridges; and in a host of civil affairs projects.

From 1900 to 1913, only
two engagements may be termed battles; the rest were ambushes,
fire­fights, and skirmishes. The major campaigns had little
connection with each other and were won by implementing a variety
of techniques to overcome the resistance in a particular locale;
efforts to trans­plant these methods were seldom
successful.

Perhaps most important,
taken together, these pacification campaigns confirmed the
prevailing Army belief that it was sufficient to extemporize from
the existing tactics. Such improvisation, together with the
advantages conveyed by better weapons, training, and logistics, all
but guaranteed victory over time. In many ways, the very success of
the Army mitigated against its having to learn from its
experiences.

Nevertheless,
conscientious officers could glean a great deal of insight into
guerrilla warfare, peace­keeping, and pacification from the
annual reports of the War Department between 1898 and 1907. In
addition to presenting the analysis of the senior military
commanders, these volumes also included a wide range of operational
accounts ranging from small skirmishes to major battles.

The service journals
printed several articles on combat on the Philippines, as well as
on the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion. Some of these contained a
wealth of information. For example, Major Hugh D. Wise's account of
fighting sectarians on the island of Samar include not only a
detailed study of enemy and American tactics, but also information
on logis­tics, intelligence, and winning over the local
popula­tion.[12] Robert L. Bullard contributed several
articles on his experiences with Moros and emphasized that
peacemaking was likely to be as important as warf­ighting in
the Army's foreseeable future.[13] But Bull­ard's views
were in a distinct minority, and he himself soon became, like many
of his peers, an advocate of preparing the Army for Great Power
conflict.

Indeed, far from
drawing lessons for future counterinsurgency campaigns, there was
far more concern that the imperial wars "played havoc" with
officers' tactical judgment and "inculcated errone­ous and
regrettable ideas."[14] Major General Leonard Wood, for example,
believed that in the Philippine War:

[W]e were opposed by a
very inferior enemy and moved as it suited us, conditions which do
not exist when confronted by troops trained for war and
well-handled. Lessons taught in schools of this sort are of little
value and usually result in false deductions and a confidence which
spells disaster when called upon to play the real game.[15]

Significantly, Wood's
attitude was indicative of his service. The new tactical systems,
first articulat­ed in the Field Service Regulations of
1905, incorpo­rated virtually nothing from the imperial wars.
There was no effort to release a manual on small wars or bush
tactics, and officers in the Philippines noted that many of the
tactical formations recom­mended in their manuals were
completely imprac­tical in jungles or rice paddies.

Some individuals who
might have been expected at the forefront of developing a
small-wars doctrine were conspicuously silent. Henry T. Allen wrote
articles on the Russo-Japanese War but nothing on what he had
learned in almost five years as a com­bat officer and
commandant of the Philippine Con­stabulary. Brigadier General
J. Franklin Bell, widely viewed as the most effective commander in
the Islands, was supposed to prepare a detailed narra­tive of
the lessons he had learned. But Bell, perhaps wisely, decided it
would be far too controversial and instead devoted his time to
military education. The only record of Bell's policies comes from a
staff officer who privately printed 500 copies of the
gen­eral's telegraphic orders on the grounds that they were
"classics on native warfare and were needed by not only the young
officers of our army but by the older ones as well."[16]

The Army also failed to
support the most ambi­tious effort to capture the lessons of
the war, John R. M. Taylor's five-volume The Philippine
Insurrec­tion Against the United States. Fascinated by the
dynamics of the guerrilla resistance, Taylor includ­ed over
1,000 captured documents that detailed the military structure,
financial system, and strate­gy of the insurgents. Of equal
importance, the doc­uments showed how decentralized the
guerrillas were, how divided by factions and personality clashes,
and how they sought to ensure popular support. In sum, the work was
an invaluable resource on the dynamics of agrarian insurgency, as
useful to officers today as a century ago.

But Taylor's dislike of
the civil government that replaced military rule offended former
civil servant James A. LeRoy. LeRoy, who was writing his own
his­tory of the war, urged William Howard Taft to sup­press
Taylor's work completely rather than allow its revision. Taylor
tried for years to reverse this deci­sion. In 1914, he urged
that at least the chapters on guerrilla war be distributed to the
troops deployed to Vera Cruz. But the Army leadership refused to
sup­port him, and the book was soon forgotten. Only in 1971 was
the book published, ironically by a Filipi­no historical
association.[17]

Similarly, the Army
made almost no effort to incorporate the lessons of the Philippine
experi­ence into its professional education system. At the
staff college at Fort Leavenworth and the Army War College,
students studied European-based "mili­tary science" and
large-unit conflicts such as the Civil War, the German Wars of
Unification, and the Russo-Japanese War. But it is virtually
impossible to find any mention in the curriculum of the
les­sons learned in the Philippines on counterinsur­gency,
peacekeeping, or occupation. Between 1903 and 1911, the Army's
strategic planning agency, the Army War College, compiled some 500
notecards relating to topics of military interest. These cards
indexed reports on European armies, weaponry, the Russo-Japanese
War, and translations of mili­tary articles but contained only
one entry on the "Philippine Question" and none on guerrilla war,
pacification, or counterinsurgency.[18]

In the Philippines,
there was only slightly more interest. In the first decade after
the end of the war, when fears of a new insurrection were
widespread, there was some effort to maintain institutional memory.
Troops were stationed in areas that were seen as potential centers
of rebellion, headquarters circulated operational reports as a
means of teach­ing tactics and techniques, and there were even
surveys of combat officers. But with the end of the Pulahan
campaign in 1907 and the rapid shift of the Scouts from
pacification to preparing to repel invasion, this knowledge was
soon forgotten.

In 1936, Charles H.
Gerhardt, a staff officer in the Army's Philippine Department in
Manila, was unable to locate a single study of military
opera­tions during the Philippine War. Yet when Gerhardt wrote
his own history of this period, he focused entirely on the
large-unit conventional operations in 1899. The ensuing far
bloodier and far longer pacification and peacekeeping operations in
the Islands he dismissed as no more than "a very extended police
system" and thus unworthy of seri­ous consideration for
military study.[19]

Gerhardt's disinterest
in the very operations that are today of far more interest than the
long-forgotten battles of 1899 illustrates a central issue-and
cen­tral problem-in understanding the impact of expe­rience
on military institutions. At the time he was writing, the
Philippines had been internally peaceful for a quarter of a
century; no Army officer seriously worried about a new insurrection
or a resumption of guerrilla war. Indeed, most were preparing (and
hoping) to withdraw from the Islands entirely when they became
independent in 1946.

Gerhardt's focus was
thus firmly fixed on what the Army had seen as its primary mission
as far back as 1905: defending Manila Bay, and perhaps Luzon, from
a Japanese invasion. Thus, he was seeking to draw lessons not on
pacification, but on how conventional forces had campaigned in the
same region which, it was widely believed, would be the primary
battleground should Japan attack. Given that this very scenario
would be played out within five years of his report, it is hard to
fault Ger­hardt's or the Army's priorities.

The Constant
Refrain

It is a constant
refrain that the United States mil­itary, and particularly the
Army, always has to relearn the lessons of its past experience with
coun­terinsurgency. This refrain is correct, but it begs far
more complex and difficult questions about institu­tional
culture and history. In its assessment of the imperial wars, and
specifically in the Philippines, the Army found ample justification
not only for its interpretation of history (the Regular Army
Narra­tive), but also for its ability to perform "police"
activities. The lessons that might have been learned from
pacification and peacekeeping in the Islands appeared to confirm
preexisting convictions about the importance of improvisation and
adaptability.

But the very diversity
of military experience in such localized and multi-faceted
campaigns miti­gated against their impact. Indeed, the nature
of the fighting raised concern that officers were more like­ly
to have learned the wrong lessons than they were to have learned
the right ones. The conviction of much of the top American
Expeditionary Forces' leadership-nearly all of them veterans of
fighting in the Philippines-that rifle-and-bayonet- equipped light
infantry could successfully assault German entrenchments is
indicative that such con­cern was justified.

Finally, the threat of
Japanese attack, which became apparent in 1905 and was an urgent
prior­ity by 1907, distracted the Army from assimilating the
lessons of pacification. Believing that it was finally preparing
for a Big War that was worthy of its professional expertise, the
Army with some sat­isfaction turned to constructing coastal
defenses and exercising brigades. Not for many more years would the
need to relearn the lessons of pacifica­tion, peacekeeping, and
occupation once again intrude upon the Army's
consciousness.

Conclusion: Policy
Implications

There is a great deal
that both military officers and defense analysts can learn from
studying the Philippine experience.

First,it remains the United
States' most success­ful counterinsurgency campaign and reveals
a wealth of information about recruiting and training native
military forces, establishing viable civil gov­ernments and
political parties, integrating civic development with military
operations, and many other issues. There is also a great deal of
practical information on tactics, logistics, intelligence
collec­tion, and administration.

Perhaps most important,
the Philippines can provide conceptual tools for anticipating the
conse­quences of both strategic policies and tactical
mea­sures today. For example, anyone with a historical
awareness of the Philippine experience should have anticipated both
the emergence of an insurgency in Iraq and the diverse nature of
Iraqi armed resis­tance. Such historical awareness was clearly
lack­ing, and in many respects, the American military
occupation has given ample proof of the old adage that those who do
not learn from the past are con­demned to repeat it.

Second,predetermined
agendas will inhibit, if not completely prevent a military
organization's ability to learn from the past. For much of the
Reg­ular Army military intellectual community, history was, is,
and will continue to be a tool with which to better fight major
conventional wars and, to a lesser extent, to understand the
transformation process needed to prepare for such large-scale
wars.

The implications for
the future are that the Army will continue to seek guidance,
inspiration, and vindication only from those historical precedents
that justify a focus on large-scale conventional war-hence the
interest in the Interwar Era-and ignore those that suggest more
attention to stability operations. Policymakers must thus exercise
a healthy skepticism of service arguments based on the "lessons of
history."

Third, military culture
plays a vital and often unrecognized role in how institutions
incorporate and assimilate wartime experience and how they define
themselves. In the past, and probably in the future, the Regular
Army officer corps has confined its definition of military
expertise almost entirely to large-scale conventional operations.
It has been very resistant to any prolonged theoretical
explora­tion of peacekeeping, pacification, occupation,
sta­bility operations, and counterinsurgency.

Given the military's
very narrow definition of what constitutes its professional
expertise, it is rea­sonable for civilian policymakers to
expect senior military leaders to provide informed (if
institution­ally self-serving) guidance on large-scale
opera­tions, tactics, and weapons. It is not at all wise to
assume equally informed advice on peacekeeping, pacification,
stability operations, occupation, and counterinsurgency.

Fourth,the lack of
attention to and interest in sta­bility operations has had
increasingly serious conse­quences for U.S. military policy. In
the Philippines, both senior and junior leaders were able to adapt
and innovate to local conditions, to recognize the nature of the
insurgency, and to develop highly effec­tive counterinsurgency
methods and policies.

But today's military is
far more structured, cen­tralized, and bound by a doctrine that
emphasizes large-scale conventional operations. It is also far more
committed to the full employment of sophis­ticated weapons
systems whose impact as "force-multipliers" is dubious. A
helicopter gunship may provide the equivalent firepower of an
infantry company, but its maintenance also removes the equivalent
of an infantry company from the field. Despite all the rhetoric of
transformation, policy­makers cannot expect military officers
raised in a zero-defects RTC-exercise-driven institution to adapt
and innovate to insurgencies with nearly the same facility as their
far less intellectually and equipment-burdened predecessors did in
1900.

Brian McAllister
Linn is a professor of history at Texas A&M University. This
analysis is adapted from a presentation delivered at a conference
on "The Test of Terrain: The Impact of Stability Operations Upon
the Armed Forces," held in Paris, France, and sponsored by the
Strategic Studies Institute of the United States Army War College,
the Centre d'Etudes en Sciences Sociales de la Défense
(Ministère de la Défense), the Royal United Services
Institute, the Association of the United States Army, the
Förderkreis Deutsches Heer, The Heritage Foundation, and the
United States Embassy Paris.

[1]Andrew J. Birtle,
U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine,
1860-1941 (Washington: Center of Mil­itary History, 1998);
Robert Scales, Terry Johnson, and Thomas Odom, Certain Victory:
The U.S. Army in the Gulf War (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1993). Some recent examples of the high quality of
"official" Army analysis of irregular conflicts and peacekeeping
are Roger F. Bauman and Lawrence F. Yates with Veralle F.
Washington, "My Clan Against the World": US and Coalition Forces
in Somalia, 1992-1994 (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies
Institute, 2004); Gordon W. Rudd, Humanitarian Intervention:
Assisting the Iraqi Kurds in Operation Provide Comfort, 1991
(Washing­ton: Department of the Army, 2004); and Armed
Diplomacy: Two Centuries of American Campaigning (Fort
Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute, 2004).

[2]Robert R. Mackey,
The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South,
1861-1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Robert
Wooster, The Military and United States Indian Policy,
1865-1903 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1988).

[3]Emory Upton, The
Military Policy of the United States (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1904). The continued popularity of
"Army Narrative" can be seen in recent autobiographies by senior
Army officers: for example, Tommy Franks and Malcolm McConnell,
American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004); Colin Powell
and Joseph Persico, My American Journey (New York:
Ballantine, 1996); and Norman Schwartzkopf, It Doesn't Take a
Hero (New York: Bantam, 1993).

[4]Roger Spiller, "The
Small Change of Soldiering and American Military Experience,"
Australian Army Journal, Vol. 2 (Winter 2004), pp.
165-175.

[5]Brian McAllister
Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2000), and Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army
and the Pacific, 1902-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997).

[6]Edward M. Coffman,
The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime,
1784-1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

[7]Johnson Hagood,
Circular Relative to Pay of Officers and Enlisted Men of the
Army (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1907).

[8]William H. Carter,
"The Next Head of the Army," Munsey's Magazine, Vol. 28
(March 1903), p. 811; Allan R. Millett, "Com­mentary," in Joe
E. Dixon, ed., The American Military and the Far East:
Proceedings of the Ninth Military History Symposium
(Washington: U.S. Air Force Academy, 1980), pp. 176-180.

[12]Hugh D. Wise,
"Notes on Field Service in Samar," Journal of the U.S. Infantry
Association, Vol. 4 (July 1907), pp. 3-58. Between 1899 and
1904, the leading professional journal-the Journal of the
Military Service Institute-contained six arti­cles on
combat in the Philippines, three on the Boer War, two on China, two
on guerrilla war, and 10 on Philippine-related topics such as
native scouts. On the distribution of War Department reports, see
George C. Marshall, Interviews and Remi­niscences for
Forrest C. Pogue, rev. ed. (Lexington, Va.: George C. Marshall
Research Foundation, 1991), p. 139.

[17]John R. M. Taylor
to Secretary, War College Division, 24 August 1914, WCD 8699-2,
Entry 296, RG 165, National Archives, Washington; John R. M.
Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States,
1898-1903: A Compilation of Documents and Introduction, 5 vols.
(1906, reprinted Pasay City, P.I.: The Eugenio Lopez Foundation,
1971); John M. Gates, "The Official Historian and the Well-Placed
Critic: James A. LeRoy's Assessment of John R. M. Taylor's The
Philippine Insur­rection Against the United States," The
Public Historian, Vol. 7 (Summer 1985), pp. 57-67; William T.
Johnston, "Methods Used in Solving Problems Presented by Guerrilla
Warfare in the Philippines," 10 July 1905, Roll 6, National
Archives Microfilm Record M-1023.

[18]T. W. Jones to
Superintendent, USMA, 5 November 1905, Entry 301, RG 165; Army War
College, Record Cards for Miscel­laneous Correspondence,
1903-1910, Entry 291, RG 165; Timothy K. Nenninger, The
Leavenworth Schools and the Old Army: Education, Professionalism,
and the Officer Corps of the United States Army, 1881-1918
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).

[19]C. H. Gerhardt, "An Account of the Conduct of
the Armed Forces of the U.S. in the Philippine Islands, 1898-1902,
from the Viewpoint of the High Command," March 1936,
Pre-Presidential Papers, Box 154 Philippine Island File, Dwight D.
Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas.